Can I pass credit card processing fees on to my clients (surcharging)?

Whether a law firm can add a credit card surcharge is governed by your state’s surcharge law and your bar’s own rules on client charges, not by anything a billing platform decides. The answer is also stricter when the payment lands in trust instead of your firm’s operating account.

Whose rule actually governs this

Surcharge law varies by state, has been challenged in court more than once, and continues to change. Some states restrict surcharging outright, some require specific disclosure to the client before a fee is added, and card networks layer their own registration and disclosure rules on top of whatever the state requires. None of that is something a billing platform can resolve for you. Whether surcharging is available to your firm, and how you’d have to disclose it if it is, is a question for your own state bar and your state’s consumer-protection or surcharge statute — not something any software can certify or clear on your behalf.

This comes up constantly because it sits right at the seam between two separate obligations: what your card processor and your state allow a merchant to do generally, and what your bar allows a lawyer to do with a client’s money specifically. A firm can be fully compliant with one and still be out of step with the other. It’s a different question from what a processor charges in the first place, which is a cost every firm accepting cards absorbs somewhere regardless of what it decides about surcharging.

Trust deposits are a stricter question again

When a client is funding trust — an advance for costs, or a retainer meant to be held rather than earned yet — that money belongs to the client, not the firm, and sits in a fiduciary account governed by trust accounting rules separate from ordinary billing. Adding a fee to what’s supposed to be an exact incoming trust amount changes what actually lands in that account relative to what left the client’s, which raises a different set of concerns than a surcharge on an already-earned invoice.

Separately, the processing fee itself — the cost a payment processor charges for handling the transaction — is deducted from the firm’s operating account, not from trust, regardless of whether a surcharge to the client is involved at all. Keeping that distinction straight matters whether or not surcharging ever enters the picture, and it matters even more once trust accounting is the account in question.

What this depends on

• Your state’s surcharge statute and how it distinguishes a surcharge from a cash discount.
• Your state bar’s rules on charging a client anything beyond the agreed fee.
• Whether the payment in question is funding trust or paying down an already-earned invoice.
• Your card processor’s own surcharge program rules and disclosure requirements.

Before you enable a surcharge for any client

Confirm the answer with your own state bar or ethics counsel before turning a surcharge on for any client, particularly one funding trust. That call belongs to them, not to a billing platform, and the trust-versus-operating distinction above holds no matter which state you’re in.

Related questions

Is there an option to charge the credit card fees to the client? Whether that’s legally available to your firm depends on your state and your bar, not on billing software — see the section above on whose rule actually governs this.

In California it’s unclear whether you can pass along credit card processing fees to clients — is that consistent with what you’re describing? State surcharge rules, including California’s, change, and they’re worth confirming directly with your state bar or your own counsel rather than treating as settled based on any outside source, including this one. The trust-versus-operating distinction above holds regardless of which state you’re in.

Can clients be made responsible for covering the payment processing fees (surcharging)? That’s the same question as surcharging generally: it turns on your jurisdiction’s law and your bar’s rules, and it gets stricter again if the payment in question is meant for trust rather than an already-earned invoice.